Audience reviews
20 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
DI0NYSIUS
STORY: 6.75/10 (Review adjusted based on show length)
Complexity: 8
World-Building: 7
Pace: 4
Direction: 8
CHARACTERS: 5/10 (Review adjusted based on show length)
Quantity vs Quality Ratio: 3 Development: 4
Depth: 8
ART, ANIMATION & MUSIC: 6.6/10 (Review adjusted based on air date)
Art Style: 8
Animation Quality: 4
Soundtrack & SFX Quality: 8
ENJOYMENT LEVEL: 6/10
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I don't know why I watched this anime 26 years later, but here's my review of it having kept in mind that it's a product of its time. Boogiepop Phantom is like an art piece, something you can admire from afar but struggle to interact/resonate with. The entire feel of the show is cold, liminal and distant. The main praise I can offer is on its bold move to adopt a non-linear…
Read at the sourceKaijuBattle
A great anime that can be confusing. You must pay attention when watching and it’s worth it. I would recommend it for anyone who likes serial experiment lain. The anime is a gothy horror with supernatural elements. There are lots of characters and things happening that might confuse people. There is a serial killer, students disappearing and an urban legend called Boogiepop. The anime has great music and that great 2000s art style. The anime has lots of mystery and the story is still non chronologically. The anime is a mix between horror and fantasy. I recommend it for anyone who likes dark fantasy.
Read at the sourceHDLiebert
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❝ Thᴇsᴇ ᴡᴏʀᴅs ᴛʜᴀᴛ I sᴡᴀʟʟᴏᴡᴇᴅ, ᴜɴᴀʙʟᴇ ᴛᴏ sᴀʏ, ʜᴜʀᴛ ɪɴ ᴍʏ ᴄʜᴇsᴛ. | 🎐 ❞
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There are works that somehow awaken a strange emotion in those who experience them... and that is not a bad thing, on the contrary, it is incredible. Due to the choice of how the work is narrated, it curiously reminded me of Satantango, though I will go deeper into that later. Speaking of Boogiepop Phantom, basically, watching the series is not following a story in the traditional sense as a whole, but perhaps inhabiting a unique atmosphere... diving into a succession of fragmented perceptions, blurred memories, and pains that never find sufficient language to expr…
Read at the sourcedeadlyspawn
Psychological-Horror greenhorns may accrue fervor for this genre by virtue of copacetic presentation & easily digestible complexity. If one is in complete intacta I could understand the high praise for this anime, this show holds up to it's contemporaries of the time.
The unique approach on visual style adds even more atmosphere to it than one would think. I'm just not a fan of the constant short clips/scenes pieced together to reach a stories' climactic events quicker. Your audience needs carefully orchestrated scenario-canoodling for the climactic moments to have the impact you want, otherwise it comes off as shock value material.
At least it's not laden with tropes & common cliché's... which is refreshing. Somewhere between the execution of this anime and the 2019 version's approach w…
Read at the sourceSgtSalamander
Boogiepop Phantom is a liminal, trippy title, with all the heady vibes of a great early-2000s psychological anime. However, despite this, it gets lost in its own mystery, and fails to deliver on the real substance that make such works great in the first place. Its themes, though obscured, are clear enough, it's just that they're not necessarily realized to their full extent, depriving the work of the weight it would otherwise enjoy. Instead of focusing on depersonalization, or addiction, or the nature of adulthood, it uses them almost as set dressing for oddball X-files cases. Indeed, this, on paper, is a formula I like, but it fails to make an actual choice as to what it wants to be- either it is presented in a nonlinear, atemporal, theoretical fashion that is heavy with symbolic meaning…
Read at the sourceSupersonic_Pain
I'm torn on this anime because I think the more anthology-like parts of the show are fantastic, it's just... it kind of wraps up with a wet sparkler of an ending rather than a satisfying conclusion.
I think part of the problem is the main characters are barely in it. You see Touka Miyashita, Nagi Kirima, and Shinpei Kuroda introduced in the OP, Boogiepop, Boogiepop Phantom, and Kazuko Suema are also given main character roles on MAL, and I think Boogiepop Phantom is the only one who really deserves that title.
For fuck's sake, you don't even learn Kazuko's first name until the last episode.
I started the first book, to this show's credit, in the middle of watching this and Kazuko shows more personality in the first chapter she appears than this whole series. Kazuko's basically the defin…
Read at the sourceCalcar
Boogiepop Phantom is a very interesting adaptation, mostly because of how different the experiences of watching it before and after reading the source material were for me. Personally, I try to view anime adaptations as standalone projects (unless explicitly stated by the creators otherwise), and that's how I'm going to look at this anime in this review as well, however, I will talk about how the adaptation relates to the light novels.
There's a way to write the plot of a story by splitting it into 2 "layers". The majority of the time the audience is shown the main layer, and only sometimes, through implications, allusions, maybe disjointed events, the writer shows what is happening in the background (the 2nd layer). This helps in a limited amount of runtime to expand on general plot, wor…
Read at the sourcerooster_
It's hard for me to review Boogiepop because by my own admission it's a hard show to follow. The story is told in non-linear fashion as the backgrounds and viewpoints of half-a-dozen characters intersect and are then analyzed independently and episodically. Individual episodes jump back and forth along the timeline as they fill in gaps regarding a supernatural incident that gave various people in a city special powers, or changed their lives permanently. However it's hard to argue with Boogiepop's lighting, ambiance, shot composition, or soundtrack, all of which are top-quality. It's the kind of laconic show that won't hold your hand and seems primarily concerned with identity in the digital age; it can certainly be seen as a companion piece with Serial Experiments Lain, and a foundational…
Read at the sourceJmePenseBonne
Spoiler-free Review!
Released on the turn of the century, Boogiepop wa Warawanai is nowadays an often forgotten part of the Madhouse catalogue, in favor of its more recent remake. Nonetheless, its characters, story, art direction and world building make for an interesting watch, despite some more average elements and awkward sound design decisions.
Characters: 8
The characters in Boogiepop wa Warawanai feel incredibly real and distinct, making them arguably its strongest suit. Rather than using the flashy age-old trope of multicolored hair to distinguish them, it instead uses careful and subtle characterization to give them clear ideals and to make the viewer sympathize with all of them, even those which would usually be pictured as ''the root of all evil'' due to their actions. The two…
Read at the sourceChrisDC
Boogiepop Phantom is an enigma.
It's the type of anime you need to watch multiple times to gain somewhat of an understanding of all its deep unlaying concepts.
It's nothing like a traditional anime and tells its story through a non-linear lens, which seems designed to confuse, disorientate and scare the viewer purposely.
As a result, the cuts, the music and even the artistic scenes look like they were made terribly on purpose; however, this is far from the truth, as Boogiepop Phantom is a masterpiece in its medium, a "Dementia Anime."
Words alone can't describe the experience that is Boogiepop Phantom; it's better seen. Still, if I were to attempt to summarize, it's an anime about our perspectives of ourselves, which often leads us down to existential dread.
This anime focuses very h…
Read at the sourceJoeGar96
Just finished this show and I have to say I’m mostly pretty positive on it. It is kind of crazy how different this adaptation is from the newer one, they feel so completely different. The contrast can easily shows how Madhouse used to have more vision than they currently do.
This show feels more like a series of short stories about its characters than one continuous plot, though it does have an overarching story. Some of the character stories are really interesting and explore great themes, other can be a bit boring. I think my biggest complaint I will throw out about this show, is that I don’t find many of the characters in this show relatable, so when I’m watching it, it’s more from the intrigue of the story, rather than just because I like x character.
For the most part this works, an…
Read at the sourceThe_Namer
Several years usually go by between each time I feel like watching this show. Despite my high opinion of it, Boogiepop Phantom is (by design) not a pleasant experience. When anime tackles the horror genre the result is usually pretty blunt, either leaning on tedious gore to get a reaction from the viewer or finding its attempts to build atmosphere being undone by adhering to standard TV anime aesthetics. This show dodges both those bullets, creating one of the few truly unsettling horror anime out there. It does this in two ways.
First, there's the audio-visual presentation. It's practically monochrome throughout, washed in a dirty sepia tone. The frame is encircled by a shadowy ring that creates a claustraphobic tunnel-vision effect. There's also some use made of focus effects that blur…
Read at the sourceVSMEGA
Well, Boogiepop Phantom has a well-structured and enigmatic atmosphere in an urban city and throughout the episodes they give information about light and neo-humans, the entity dedicated to Shinigami, the aliens and the serial killer, and gathering all this information will arrive understanding and characters are used in the puzzle although they are just passing disposable fragments for the final plot and are not the main solution, the anime provides all the information needed to get to the ace of the matter but watch marathon or not watch closely, possibly lack holes without resolution to the viewer and such understanding will be contained in the anime that passed and can draw the conclusion and interpret that Boogiepop Phantom too complex but actually it's not quite that, sometimes Boogi…
Read at the sourceIllikas
If I was to sum up Boogiepop Phantom's tone in a single word, the first word that instantly comes to mind for me is “haunting”. Seriously, nothing in real life has ever legitimately scared me. Not much in fiction has scared me either. But this… Excuse me while I go hide in a closet. I’ll put it this way: This series terrifies me so much that it nearly made me genuinely vomit in my mouth almost every time I watched a new episode, or at least in the case of about the first half of the show’s run.
Boogiepop Phantom is both intriguing and horrifying at the same time to me. After a beam of light shot up into the sky a month prior, several strange, paranormal occurrences began happening all throughout the nameless town this series takes place in. It’s one of those shows that doesn’t explain wha…
Read at the sourcealmightyshiva
What I find unique about this anime compared to other anime that I have watched is
The art of unconventional storytelling:
Serial experiments lain ,Fyodor Dostoevsky (specifically crime and punishment ,the idiot),Radiohead
All have put very uncomfortable creepy depressed way of story telling
"Everyone wants to see a human heart in conflict"
Nobody could imagine a dark and theme subject can be touched and presented
in this format that is quite unique to the genre itself.
The very subtle way of diving into fantasy world.: Lewis Caroll alice in this wonderland . David lynch's fountainhead.
every art form is presented and touched upon to represent the form of human heart the human emotion.
Boogiepop phantom does this in very unconventional and sophisticated way.
Forming connection with the…
Read at the sourcetowelgirl21
First of all, Boogiepop Phantom will be confusing as hell if you don't know the storyline of the first novel (and the sixth novel, Boogiepop at Dawn, which is a prequel to the first novel). The easiest way to avoid such confusion is to watch the anime "Boogiepop and Others" (2019) first, since it adapts both those novels. I'm serious, watch that first.
Note: I have not seen Serial Experiments Lain, so I can't make any comparisons to that like many other reviewers have.
Boogiepop Phantom is an original story set right after the first novel, and I mean RIGHT after, because the mysterious pillar of light that starts the events of this series is the climax of the first novel.
Here's the plot: A pillar of light in the sky involving aliens makes electromagnetic waves that give a bunch of peop…
Read at the sourceREC3
Boogiepop Phantom should this even exist, of course it does. It's a good anime at best, for me it was kind of just okay.
Sometimes you wonder if the story is going anywhere worthwhile. Does it? No, but at least it tries. The story isn't pointless though, it deals a bit with electricity and how society could be hurt even greatly hurt by cutting off electric supplies. Enter Boogiepop he comes with a flash of lightning in the dark. It's not the best, just kind of noir or a crime noir.
It tries to suck you in with its music and sound effects. Yes, every horror show ever made does this. It falls in many tropes of the horror genre. It's a decent light horror anime, perhaps a little bland.
My advice is don't pay a lot for this or just stream it. It's decent and won't scare you to death. If th…
Read at the sourcePandemonium1
The anime on its own doesn't give much insight into the mind of its creator. For that one would probably need to read a few of his light novels too. But that doesn't take anything away from it.
The concept isn't particularly mindblowing. It is just another supernatural story but it does achieve quite a lot in its execution. It explores many philosophical and psychological themes--the most prominent ones being time and change. It also presents its own philosophy which I thought was something along the lines of accepting change so that we may attain a higher state of being. One of its episode's take on escapism I thought was quite ahead of its time.
It is a highly symbolic work as many of its elements either symbolise or allude to ideas that have influenced Kadono.
Now moving to the ma…
Read at the sourceliteraturenerd
It's now 2019 and I'll start the year out with reviewing something... challenging.
I was thinking about taking it easy and just gushing praise on Space Brothers or Mononoke or Kino's Journey. However, I don't have much to say on those series that hasn't already been said many times before. Those series are great and most people here on MAL are already aware of that. Instead, I'll be looking at an overlooked little title called Boogiepop Phantom. This series has a lot of stuff going for it, but can still be very frustrating.
Boogiepop Phantom was adapted from a longrunning series of light novels, but this is one of the most baffling adaptations I've ever seen. I don't just mean that the show's plot is confusing, although it certainly is. I mean I have NO idea why it was adapted the way i…
Read at the sourceLupinXXIII
If anime is notorious for anything, it's the the jigsaw puzzle plot. And BOOGIEPOP PHANTOM is the ultimate puzzle plot. That's saying something considering the show doesn't even give you all of the pieces. Set against the backdrop of Kouhei Kadono's larger multimedia project of BOOGIEPOP (of which I cannot claim any familiarity with beyond this program), one can be forgiven for coming away from PHANTOM feeling like they are missing the bigger picture. The context for the events within the show and many of its characters, especially those named in the OP, is at best merely hinted at and clearly can be made sense of only through engaging with the larger franchise. Still, there is more to be deciphered from the scattered fragments of PHANTOM than can initially be parsed from a first-viewing.…
Read at the source
